For the Good Times

by David Keenan

  Where are you going to go? I says to him. That’s easy, he says. I’m going to Egypt. What the fuck is it with you and Egypt? Tommy says to him. It’s where it all began, Barney says.

  Where what all began?

  This, Barney says, pointing all around himself. Fucking humanity, he says to us. Life. It all began in Egypt? Tommy says to him. That’s right, Barney says. We wouldn’t be sitting here reading the comics without them. What about The Bible? Tommy says to him. Where did that all happen? That all happened in Egypt, Barney says. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. That happened in Jerusalem, Tommy says. And in Bethlehem, he says. That’s nowhere near Egypt. Sure it’s just across the road, Barney says. Same corner of the world. What about the Garden of Eden? Tommy says to him. Did that take place in Egypt? That was a garden in Africa, Barney says, and he shrugs. Same thing. The fucking Garden of Eden walked out of Africa on two legs, I says to them. I should know, I was balls-deep in it the other night.

  That gets a good laugh.

  What are these rumours about a blow job we’re hearing? Barney says to me. Pat says you had fucking love juice all over your dick. Fucking poof juice, more like, Tommy says. I met this cracking wee bird at a disco, I says to them. She sucked my cock in the bog. Are you sure it was a bird? Tommy says to me. The only people sucking cock in the toilets of Belfast these days are fucking three-speeds. Oh, it was a bird alright, I says to them. And she was top-notch. What was her name? Tommy says to me. He’s got me on the spot. I’m trying to make something up and I’m drawing blanks. Sonja, I says to them finally. Her name was Sonja, I says. Sonja? Tommy says. Bullshit. There’s nobody in Belfast goes by the name of Sonja, he says. The fuck is this cunt talking about, Barney says, this fucking Sexy Sword of Conan shite is going to his head. He thinks he’s fucking Red Sonja. Do you realise that you have to beat her in combat before you can ride her? he says to me. I know, I says to him. I know. Part of the challenge, isn’t it? But secretly my head was spinning. It was true. This comic stuff was getting out of control.

  *

  I told you about Arlene, right, Pat’s bird with the mouth that was too tight for a cock? One night I mind her saying to Pat about how when they get married all his Como records were going in the skip. I’m not making this up, dumping fucking Como records in a skip, what a devious bitch.

  I mean but Patrick was at fault and all. A tight-mouthed little bitch like that should have been told precisely nadja about what happened with The Boys. But Pat was a fucking show-off and a wise guy and he would probably have been a fucking yuppie if they had got around to inventing that yet.

  One night we’re at The Shamrock and he’s insisting on getting a big fuck-off bottle of champagne for everyone and of course Arlene loves it, of course she does, and she’s egging him on the whole way. Go on, she says to him. Sure, you’re a high-flyer, so you are. Soon you’ll be a commandant.

  I picked up on that straight away: oh man. That meant he was telling her things he shouldn’t have. Never involve your family, if you can avoid it. It’s a sensible rule, son. But more than that, even, do-not-involve-your-new-bird-who-won’t-even-give-you-a-fucking-blow-job is rule number one.

  As Patrick is walking away – he’s got yet another one of his electric-blue suits on, an unforgettable look – I see him mime putting a gun up to his head and pulling the trigger and winking at Arlene, who is all giggles. I couldn’t believe my lamps. He thinks he’s the fucking executioner now.

  I says to Tommy at the time, Arlene knows too much and plus she’s a devious, small-mouthed bitch. It’s that fucking moustache that gets me, Tommy says.

  Okay, so you’re probably about to bring up Kathy with me. But that’s my point. When me and Kathy met up, it was like we met in another world, a world that just happened to look like a hotel room at the Europa. It might as well have been a spaceship in orbit for all the connection it had to Belfast and the day job and what happened with her and her man. And I made sure to keep it buttoned when it came to anything to do with the Ra. That’s where Patrick ballsed up.

  Next thing you know, him and Arlene have split up. I meet Pat for a drink and he’s clearly agitated. What was I doing with that devious, no-use lesbo? he says to me. It was my fucking cock talking, he says. He laments his own cock talking in a voice that is hard to feel sorry for. Patrick, I says to him, all your cock was doing was fucking complaining, far as I can see.

  She went mental when I told her we were finished, he says. She put a shoe right through the kitchen window and then she was standing out on the front step, cursing the day she ever set eyes on me.

  She loved you, eh? I says to him. She must’ve, he says, and he shrugs.

  Listen, I says to him, I don’t mean to speak out of turn here, but you didn’t tell her anything you shouldn’t have, you didn’t give her any information she could use against you, did you?

  Pat takes a blue-and-white polka-dot hanky out his top bin, and wipes his mouth. He leans toward me and with his finger he draws an invisible square on the table. Let me remind you, he says to me, that this is a student–teacher relationship. Don’t let the snakeskin shoes fool you, he says to me. Then he gets up and walks out the pub. It was the last time I ever saw him alive. It was a fucking life lesson, that’s for sure.

  *

  Pat was shot in the back while out gardening on what I still mind as being a glorious Saturday afternoon in May, when two gunmen pulled up on a motorcycle in the blazing sunshine and let off five shots, two of which punctured his lungs, one of which got him right through the fucking heart.

  I always imagined the bullet flying through the centre of his heart like a rocket, his heart beating in just the right rhythm for impact, closed up tight, like a fist. Another breath in or out, I tell myself, and he might be on a ventilator, but he would still be alive.

  His sister Helen heard the shots and found him face down in the pond. I asked Helen for his snakeskin shoes. I want to walk in them, I says to her. I would consider it an honour.

  It doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together. Tommy rounds up Miracle Baby and we quiz him about what he knew. Who killed Patrick, Miracle Baby? Tommy says to him. We called him Miracle Baby to his face, just like the Buddha. It was the UDA, Miracle Baby says to us. Fucking vile cunts, Tommy says, and he stamped his foot on the floor and fucking crushed the fag he was smoking in his hand. This is fucking war, Tommy says to us, and I don’t know if he meant it as in the war had just this minute started because of this affront or whether he was just expressing his angst at the repercussions of this endless fucking battle that had all of us bogged down in it and with eyes in the back of our head in the first place.

  Why’d he get shot, Miracle Baby? I says to him. There was a horrible big bogey on Miracle Baby’s lip at this point. Encrusted there. Because he shot the guy first, Miracle Baby says to us. What, Tommy says, who did he shoot? To be truthful, he had probably shot a lot of people but tellingly none of us knew very much about any of them. That’s the way it should be. He shot Donny McLaughlin, Miracle Baby says. He shot Donny McLaughlin at the party.

  Now, everybody knew about Donny McLaughlin. A notorious UDA hatchet man with a skelly eye. Famously he had been plugged at his own wedding. It was a bold and notorious killing. A sniper had taken him out from a window across the way, just as the confetti went up in the air. The bride’s dress was covered in blood. The best man, who the gunman went ahead and maimed just for the sport of it, walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

  Tommy and me turned to each other with a look of awe. It was only our own fucking Patrick O’Leary who had killed Donny McLaughlin: legend.

  I don’t want to ask you anything else, Miracle Baby, Tommy says to him. You know too much. I’m afraid you’re going to start telling me my future. Miracle Baby laughed and he clapped his hands.

  I can tell that too, if you want me to, he says. The only thing I want you to do for now, Tommy says to the wee guy, is to keep being my secret friend. Can I keep bein
g your gardener too? Miracle Baby says to him. That too, Tommy says, and he gives him a couple quid and Miracle Baby went off to wander the streets without adult supervision as usual.

  Fucking Patrick John Michael O’Leary, Tommy says, and he runs his hand through his hair and starts with the whole twirling it round his finger and pulling it out routine. The guy was fucking serious, he says to me. Fucking taking the best man out, I says to him. That was above and beyond. But if we didn’t even know he did it, Tommy says, then who the fuck did? Arlene, I says to him. Obviously, Tommy says.

  I pulled out my gun and I cocked it, just like they do in the movies. She’s scrubbed, I says to Tommy. And we’ll take her best man with her, just for Pat’s sake.

  *

  When me and my brother were wee my father would take us out the back and we had this big blanket that we would lie down on, me, my brother Peter and my da, and we would lie there, at night, on warm nights in the summer we would lie there and my father would point to the stars in the night sky, every star is a planet just like ours, he says to us, and we would fall asleep, with our heads on his chest, his warm chest, rising and falling, and that smell he had, that manly smell, calm and happy as we drifted off, sure in the knowledge that up above us, and carrying on forever, were planets where fathers and sons lay out in the night on blankets together and pointed to each other, lying there, high, in the night-time sky.

  *

  So as we round up a meeting with Mackle McConaughey because we want to run it past the top brass. Let us do it, we says to him, let us take revenge. Mack says, naw. It’s a pointless civilian killing, he says to us. It does us no good whatsoever, he says. I couldn’t believe what I was fucking hearing. Tommy took it better. He was philosophical about it. Fuck it, he says.

  I argued the specifics of our case. I says that she gave up being a civilian when she turned into a fucking rat. You’ve no proof, Mack says. Give me a break, I says to him. Did you know it was Patrick that shot fucking Donny McLaughlin at his wedding? I says to him. If I did I wouldn’t be telling you, Mack says to me. Did I tell you Mack had his hair up in a ponytail at this point? Worst look ever. Listen, I says to this ponytailed comedian, none of us even knew. But if anybody did, it was fucking that bitch Arlene. You know what Pat was like, I says to him, he was larger than life. He was a fucking boy. All it would take is some boasting in the bed afterward. We’ve nothing to go on, Mack says. All this does is open another front that we could do without. Rule number one, he says, no opening of pointless domestic fronts if you can avoid it. I was beginning to wonder just how many fucking rule number ones there were in the IRA.

  So there’s to be no revenge? I says to Mack. I was disgusted, quite frankly. Revenge comes in time, he says. Till then, hang tight. Then he pats me on the leg like I’m a wee dumb kid and nothing but. You fucking catch that? I says to Tommy afterward. I caught it, he says. I caught it.

  Looking back from now I can see the psychology but at the time I was raging. Let it go, Tommy says to me. Miracle Baby might find out about the UDA gunman yet, he says, you never know. In the meantime, we keep our ears to the ground. Till then, keep punting the fucking comics. I had to laugh, what a mad situation. Tommy put his arm round me and we walked off. But for the life of me I just could not stop plotting.

  *

  I knew Arlene’s address, we had picked her up in a taxi a few times on our way to the dancing, and I started going by her house and keeping an eye on her. She still lived with her ma and da at the Glen Road, in a wee house with a brand-new estate car in the driveway. Even that annoyed me. Where did they get the money for a brand-new estate? It wasn’t from sucking cock, that’s for sure.

  I started to get a pretty good idea of her schedule. She worked at a vet’s in Ladybrook. She was always taking animals back and forth to the surgery. Maybe she was trying to save them from getting put down, who knows, I couldn’t give a shite, because after all, Hitler loved his animals and we all know what he got up to in his spare time.

  Most nights I would split from the shop, if I was on the rota, and sit outside her house, sunk down in the front seat of the car, and spy what she was up to. Mostly she stayed in. I saw her da, he was on one of them portable oxygen tanks. Sometimes he would come out onto the step and smoke a fag, standing there double-fisting the oxygen mask and the bifter; fucking chronic.

  It was the same warm summer, those beautiful evenings in Belfast where it never goes dark except for the sky goes blue, dark blue, and then purple, and then back to blue again, like it isn’t even the sky but the sea up above. One time I watched them having this pathetic barbecue in their front garden, the three of them, the da on the oxygen, the ma in her wheelchair and Arlene sitting there between them, cooking sausages on an old rancid grill. It was probably the fucking dogs from the clinic they were eating. It sticks in my mind, that night. These sad old horrors, slumped in their chairs, in this fucking dump of a garden, not even speaking to each other but eating hot dogs off paper plates and fucking sitting round this white plastic table and fucking … staring into themselves in silence, beneath this deep fucking purple sea that was right there up above them. All they needed was a couple of party hats and it would’ve been a full-blown tragedy. Not that I gave a toss. My intention was that all three of them would be dragging around medical equipment till the end of their days. That is, if they weren’t burying Arlene first.

  And sometimes I would sit there, outside their house, and watch them before I was due to meet Kathy at the Europa. I was counting my blessings then, the equivalent of staring at a picture of starving Biafrans with flies crawling over their faces and then going to a party in the fucking Hilton. But I kept it up, night after night, and if you were to ask me why, I’d tell you that I did it in order to keep my hatred sharp.

  *

  Paddy from Ireland goes to

  the doctor’s

  complaining of stomach

  pains.

  Sure, I can’t find anything

  wrong with you,

  the doctor says,

  I’m thinking

  it must be

  the drinking.

  Ah, no worries

  doctor,

  Paddy says to him,

  I’ll come back again

  when yr sober.

  *

  In the middle of all this we start hearing rumours of a new bombing campaign. Tommy calls in the one and only Miracle Baby. Aye aye, he says, it’s true. I’ve heard that, he says. The plan is to take out multiple targets over the space of a month, all high-profile tourist attractions. And the Europa is on the list.

  A million different scenarios flash through my mind.

  Barney’s sitting with his feet up on the desk when I walk into the shop and he’s singing ‘Happy Days Are Here Again’. I’m guessing somebody’s heard the news? I says to him. We’re upping the game, Barney says. Now’s the time, Xamuel McMahon, he says to me, now is the time to do something great. Something significant.

  By the way, did you hear about our Kathleen’s man? he says to me. No, what happened? I says to him. His brother got lifted by the UFF, he says. They took him to a fucking romper room. Is he dead? I says to him. He’d be better off dead, Barney says. They fractured his skull seven time. The fuck is that even possible? I says to him. Then they fucking hacked his legs with a machete, Barney says. Then they fucking left the body in the waste ground at Sandy Row but everybody was too scared to go and rescue him in case it was a trap or they got incriminated, so as he was left to crawl on his hands and knees up till the Donegall Road before somebody called an ambulance.

  These people are fucking animals, I says to Barney. Killing is too good for them. Maiming, Barney says, maiming and maiming again, it’s the only way. We need to get in on this, I says to him. I’m about ready to explode, I says. It’s time for something spectacular. It had to be the Europa. And it had to be me.

  1977. It was about to be the bloodiest summer of our lives. And I decided to kick it off in style
.

  *

  Through my own covert operations I had discovered that Arlene had a new man. And that he was from the other side. Bitch was in bed with these animals. That’s what had cost Patrick his life. For all I know this was the same guy she had told about the Donny McLaughlin shooting. I had found my best man.

  I saw him come pick her up in a car and drive her to a place off the Crumlin Road, a seedy wee place with a boarded-up window on the top floor, typical UDA rathole. Now it was no longer a civilian killing. Now it was all about eradicating vermin.

  I start casing the joint. I would drive by at different times of the day but there was never that much going on. Sometimes boys would come and go but I was confident that he lived there on his own. Plus and now I had a silencer. I lifted it from Tommy’s da’s legendary gun stash. This was going to be a cakewalk, I says to myself. I start to getting ballsy.

  One afternoon I see this cunt leaving the house and locking up, this ugly-looking cunt with the shaved head, disgusting. Once I was sure he wasn’t coming back any time soon, I pushed my way through the hedge and I crawled round the back of the house to the garden. Now this neighbourhood was a fucking hotbed of Huns. If anyone had caught me at it, it would’ve been like Kathleen’s man’s brother, or whoever the fuck he was, getting carted up the road. There was a window cracked open at the back. I couldn’t resist it. I climbed in.

  The place is like a morgue in there, or a wax museum, it’s so still. I can tell that there’s nobody home. There’s a little drinks tray on wheels in the living room with a full bottle of Bushmills on it. I go to grab it but then I think to myself, I’ll come back later and celebrate with that fucker once I’ve cut the pair of their throats. There was a pile of video cassettes on the coffee table. The French Connection. Rollerball. I creep out into the hallway and I edge my way up the stair. I had grown up in a house with the exact same layout, so as I knew my way about. I checked the bathroom. Blue with brown carpets. Just like my ma’s. Then I spot a loofah floating in the filled-up bath. The water’s still warm. There’s still bubbles on the surface. Ah fuck, I says to myself, somebody’s home after all.